Welcome to our roundup series where we will hit on several gear news and rumor topics each day. This gives you a chance to get caught up on all of the day’s news and rumors in one place. Make sure to check back daily for the latest gear news, rumors, and announcements.

Olympus Announces New Pen-F

We have talked about it for several weeks now, but it was made official today by Olympus. The new PEN-F features a retro rangefinder style design with silver metal and black leather; Hipsters rejoice!

I am actually really diggin’ the look of the new PEN-F, and those specs are nothing to scoff at either. The lack of 4K will be a disappointment to video people, but Olympus has not ever prioritized video on their cameras, so it shouldn’t be all that surprising.

Overall, it looks like a really solid rangefinder-style body for the Micro Four Thirds system.

The new Olympus PEN-F will start at $1,199 for the body only, and will be available in two variants (silver and all black). They are available for pre-order now over on B&H (Black Version Here, Silver Version Here) and are expected to begin shipping in ‘early’ March.

Canon Flagship Announcement Coming Next Week?!

Well, the time has come. According to the latest rumor reports, Canon will announce their next flagship camera (assumed to be called the EOS-1D X MkII) next week.

We have all been wondering when Canon would announce its next flagship, given that Nikon dropped the D5 bomb earlier this month at CES, and now it appears that we have our answer. The announcement is expected to take place on Monday the 1st or Tuesday the 2nd of February.

We don’t have any new specs regarding this flagship camera other than what we have shared previously. If the announcement is, in fact, coming next week, though, expect some fairly solid spec leaks to start coming in over this weekend. Stay tuned!

iPhone 7 Expected To Feature New Dual Lens Camera Design

We don’t talk about smartphone cameras often, for obvious reasons, but this new rumor regarding the iPhone 7 caught our attention this morning.

According to a report over on Mac Rumors, the next iPhone is expected to feature some sort of new dual-lens camera technology. The technology was made possible by Apple’s acquisition of LinX last year, and it is expected to offer some impressive improvements over just about every other smartphone out there right now.

“LinX technology offers several improvements the iPhone 7 Plus could benefit from, including multiple sensors for a smaller size, possibly eliminating the need for a protruding camera lens. The lenses would also have better sensitivity to light and greatly improved image quality in low light.”

You can get more details about this interesting technology over on the Mac Rumors report. But as far as what this could mean for smartphone camera technology?

It will be interesting to see how this technology looks once released.

What are your thoughts on today’s roundup? What news/rumors did we miss? What would you like to see covered in future roundups? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think!

Anthony Thurston is a photographer based in the Salem, Oregon area specializing in Boudoir. He recently started a new project, Fiercely Boudoir to help support the growing boudoir community. Find him over on Instagram. You may also connect with him via Email.

The Linx stuff is immediately suspect… but then again, for Apple, the $20 million they paid for the company was just the coins their found in their basement couch.

The immediately suspect part is the phrase “DSLR-quality images” that permeates all of the press on this. You will definitely be able to deliver a better photo with two of the same tiny little 1/3″ cameras than one. That’s twice the light collecting area, and a chance to average out noise. But not the 50x increase between today’s iPhone and any old FF DSLR.

The Linx claim for their cameras was “significantly smaller than any camera on the market today, leading the way to DSLR performance in its slim handsets.” Linx, I don’t think that word means what you think it means. And you’ve probably seen this one, too, making similar “DSLR” claims.. but at least they have 16 tiny camera modules: https://light.co/camera.

My latest smartphone, the LG V10, already has a side-by-side dual-camera setup in the front. It’s a neat little hack — if you want a wider angle image (group video chat or, ugh, selfies), it stitches images from both tiny cameras together, offering a wider image. For a phone, this one has a great camera, actually better than some P&S models (mostly because of diffraction, which you get with a P&S sporting an f/3.5 lens on a 1/2.3″ sensor, but not on a phone with an f/1.8 lens on a 1/2.6″ sensor).

As always, I get geeky about the Canon 1D line’s newest offering, as a good 50% of its new hotness will find its way into my next 5D.

What I expect the 5D4 to steal from the 1DX II: New AF system, new viewfinder enhancements, expanded teleconverter usage with AF, and hopefully some sort of onboard wireless file control or flash control.

What I *won’t* see the 5D4 get from the 1DX II: 4K video, spot metering at any AF point ([fist shake] CANON!!!), and the obvious 1D differentiators — sensor, burst rate and buffer size.

While I agree… I think Canon is just stacking shortcoming on shortcoming these days. Take 4K. Sure, they want you to buy a Cinema EOS or 1D X… but eveyone else is delivering 4K. Panasonic’s had it for two years in the GH4 and these days, it’s in every new camera. Sony seems to be headed the same way. Heck, even my Olympus OM-D E-M5II was upraded free to shoot 4K “timelapse” (5fps or slower MJPEG).

They’re both Sony sensors, but for some reason I’d bet on the D500, if only because the 20MP GX8 is sliiightly more garbage at ISO 12800 than the D7200 is at ISO 25600, and the D500 has an extra 500g of metal mass to dissipate sensor heat.

That’s impressive, but it doesn’t tell us much. It’s a downressed 0.6MP image, shot with controlled artificial light, at 1/160s and f8, which is a pretty high LV. In my experience (and YMMV) digital sensors fall down based on the absolute quality of light, in truly dark situations when shot noise dominates. Especially with an ISO-invariant sensor the way more modern Sony sensors are.

So it’s nice, but doesn’t really show what the camera can do in situations where you’ll actually need ISO 51200…

possibly but you can also get lot of noise on full frame at iso 200. Yes theres light added and I hear what you’re saying but down sampled and whatever else they did IMO doesn’t really matter because that detail is still there which is pretty amazing for a dx. Really it has 1 competitor (7dm2), i’d bet the iq on this one is 20-30% better and the noise handling should just crush it.

Everyone uses them differently, so obviously they can’t do a shot for everyone and personally I think the shot tells me that I “could” use that iso and do my voodoo to it and still have a image most people would have no idea that it was shot at that. I think my d7000 at iso 400 has more noise than that lol.

The bottom line is that while it’s not going to be “perfect” for everyones imaginary, fabled dx camera but you can surely bet it’s going to absolutely destroy every other dx out there.

I swore id never get another dx after going fx but this has me a lot more interested than some halfass, crappy mirrorless lil tea cup camera.

It’s pretty hard for me as I shoot to even imagine needing 51,200…. i’ve never needed more than 6400. Plus it going that high just helps the lower values be cleaner.

Thankfully they don’t handle noise like canon does and merge pixels together to give the illusion but also taking away iq and sharpness.

The Pen F is usng the same IMX269 sensor that’s in the Panasonic GX8, so I’d expect pretty identical results. This is not an EXMOR R (BSI) or EXMOR RS (stacked) sensor, unfortunately, as Sony has only delivered that at FF and 1″ and below. Checking the GX8 versus my OM-E E-M5II on DxO, they find the 20Mpixel sensor a bit noisier, but with 0.2EVs better DR. You do expect newer chips to benefit some from technology improvements, but changing the architecture to BSI/stacked would be a big jump in quality.

Assuming Sony made the D500 sensor, I would expect the D500 to outperform the Nikon D7200, thanks to the slightly lower resolution sensor, and probably deliver better on its absurdly-high-for-its-sensor-size ISO limit than the Pen F. But the extended ISOs on these new Nikons is pure fantasy. Was someone really asking for that?

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